Home mentor: Dr. Joachim von Braun, Center for Development Research, University of Bonn, Germany

Host mentor: Dr. Andrew Thorne-Lyman, WorldFish, Malaysia

Short biography:

Abu Hayat Md. Saiful Islam studied Agricultural Economics and International Rural Development at the Bangladesh Agricultural University in Mymensingh (Bangladesh), the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) and the Gent University (Belgium). Saiful is trained as an agricultural economist and holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Bonn, Germany supervised by Prof. Dr. Joachim von Braun (Center for Development Research). His thesis evaluated the impact of Integrated Aquaculture-Agriculture (IAA) in Bangladesh, focusing on the value chain participation and welfare as well as environmental impacts on the extreme poor. Dr Saiful’s research interests focuses on adoption and impact assessment of different technology, policy and institutional innovation with particular focus on developing country agriculture by using a range of cross sectional and panel micro econometric techniques including experimental and quasi-experimental methods. Saiful has also involved in a range of projects, including contract farming, choice experiment, fertilizer use, climate change impacts, fish conservation, fish consumption and nutrition linkages etc. Dr Saiful’s IMMANA research aims to establish the causal link between fish consumption and nutrition including the factors that affect fish consumption and preference by taking care of the drawback of different dietary recall instruments, seasonality, location and different strata of the people.